Odd this day

Well, if it’s 4 June… of course: it’s the 228th anniversary of the day London was destroyed in an apocalyptic earthquake, taking the government with it. Or would have been, had Richard Brothers actually been a prophet and not… slightly misguided, let’s say.

It was the second date he’d predicted for the end of the capital, which had originally been scheduled for August 1793, but Brothers had managed to intercede with God, who had agreed — infinite wisdom and all that — to a postponement.

He had a direct line to the almighty, though, because they were personally acquainted. Family, in fact. Presumably aware that the position of son of God was already taken, Brothers had declared himself the nephew of God.

Former navy ensign Brothers had returned from the sea in 1787 “to find his bride of only a few months in bed with another man. He sought solace in religion.” To be specific, he joined the Illuminati of Avignon, founded by eccentric Polish count Tadeusz Grabianka

Grabianka planned to gather the lost tribes of Israel in Avignon, march from there to Poland, overthrow the Polish government, lead the Polish Army to Jerusalem, conquer it, and be recognised as the Messiah.

Brothers like this plan a lot, but for one detail. He felt the Messiah ought to be English rather than Polish. So, he returned to London, studied the Bible to calculate that Jerusalem would be occupied on 19 November 1798, and set about assembling the tribes of Israel in order to be ready by then.

His mission took the form, initially, of writing to the King, the Queen, the Prime Minister, and the Commons Speaker to tell them that the war with France was the war against God prophesied in Revelations. Oddly, these letters were ignored.

But if you didn’t like this prophecy, he had others, some of which came true enough to attract followers.

He forecast famine and distress for 1793, and they came to pass … He forecast defeat of the French and Prussian armies, and the English conquest of Jersey and Guernsey.

Crucially, he also “forecast the violent deaths of the kings of France and Sweden”. The Swedish king was assassinated in 1792, and the French rendered Louis XVI several inches shorter than nature intended the following year.

So, by August 1793, he was famous — and this, of course, was when London had (initially) been scheduled for demolition. At this point, “the worst electrical storm in memory” struck. A man in Ipswich was struck by lightning inside his house, people lost chimneys and windows, residents of Leicestershire were treated to oddly shaped hailstones up to six inches across, and others

reported seeing bands of angels with drawn swords leaping from the sun, or fiery dragons hurtling across the sky against hosts of angels massed in battle array.

Of course they did. Which could only mean one thing: yes, it was time for Richard to get a book out. A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and the Times, with its “visions of Satan strolling down Tottenham Court Road with a sly, crafty smile” duly appeared.

This would all have been fine for Brothers — apocalypse predictions have always been ten a penny — but he also started hanging out with engraver and known subversive William Sharp, who had only recently narrowly avoided being done for treason.

These were febrile times, with Britain facing the godless and kingless French abroad and radicals at home, so if you seemed to have a talent for swaying the masses, the powers that be might get… concerned.

Brothers kept trying to persuade the King to step down to avoid the wrath of Uncle God, but to no avail. So, in a further edition of the book in February 1795, it was time to be a bit more direct.

At the time, the offence of treason — as well, of course, as being punishable by death — included ‘imagining’ the king’s death, and this passage was considered to be the wrong side of the line. He was nicked, tried, and found guilty.

Luckily, the Lord Chancellor decided Brothers should see a doctor, and he was sent to an asylum rather than the gallows. Even this didn’t appease his supporters, though. One was even an MP, Nathaniel Brassey Halhead, who made long Commons speeches denouncing the injustice.

His case was also bolstered by a massive thunderstorm in London on 4 June. According to the Past Tense blog, radical printer John Binns,

took shelter from the downpour in an ale-house, where he found 50 or 60 people… awaiting Brothers’ foretold apocalypse

It didn’t do him any good, though. Brothers finally got out in 1806, when he was no longer considered a threat, by which time everyone had moved on and started getting their doomsday mumbo-jumbo from Joanna Southcott (due to give birth to Shiloh, the true Messiah, on 19 October 1814).

He died, forgotten, in 1824 — thus gaining little satisfaction from the fact that he was buried in St John’s Wood opposite Joanna Southcott who had died childless 10 years earlier.